A journey through policy, progress, and being a patient by Kate Steadman

December 27, 2005

Learning from Cerner

HIS Talk has a great post examining what really went wrong with Cerner's CPOE (computerized physician order entry) system. For those of us who strongly believe in the awesome potential of HIT, it's essential to know what went wrong, and what we can do better.

I'm glad they did the study, but it seems to me more of a "don't do what we did" lesson for hospitals, not an indictment of Millennium. I think their purpose was to raise the awareness of broad outcomes in a major system change and the article does a good job of that.

I'm always quick to jump in a vendor-bashing line, but anyone who sees this article as valid Cerner criticism is wrong, in my opinion. I doubt any other vendor would have done better. I doubt every Cerner implementation has these problems. I'm sure that the hospital would make better implement decisions if they were doing it over again, as would most CPOE early adopters.

Go read the original critique by the HIT expert -- it's a valuable discussion of the intricacies of HIT programming and hospital implementation and well worth your time.

Comments

The comments about the userability (otherwise known as HCI) bothered me. Its one thing if this was a test run, but it wasn't. If the goal is the make people like longer, than the effort required of physicians out to be one of the top priorities, and its inexcusable that these sorts of things aren't worked out before live implementation.

In the end, contrary to what many people believe, HCI is not that difficult as to render the most streamlined possible process impossible. Its just that companies don't consider it their top priority.